What comes first - People or Infrastructure?

The concept of the development of Paerata began before Franklin became part of Auckland when the then Auckland Regional Council were looking for areas to build more houses. One of the other areas they were considering was the Pukekohe A&P Showgrounds, and that subsequently took some 5 years to fight off.

I was Chairman of the Franklin Economic Development Agency at the time, bringing together the economic, business and tourism groups to look at ways to develop opportunities for Franklin.

There are many who believe that the sole reason for annexing Franklin into Auckland City was purely and simply a land grab to enable them to build the huge number of houses they anticipated would be needed for the burgeoning Auckland population - and they had pretty much run out of land in the city.

One of the issues raised then and still relevant, is the use of elite soils on which to build houses. Now we are flat out building dormitory suburbs in Franklin in elite soils.. And the fact is that Franklin will go from being one of the least populated of the 21 Wards of Auckland, to the most populated in a relatively short period of time.

The owners of the land were looking at how to develop that and originally were looking at a concept of Live, Work, Play. This would be a mix of businesses and homes so people could either bicycle or walk to work and hence develop a true sense of community where people got to spend more time with their families and be involved in their community. A lovely ideal.

Regardless of the model, for me there are a couple of issues with any housing development. The first is using elite soils to build on. The second is our approach of people first, then infrastructure.

In 1950 the average farm fed 27 people, by 1917 the number had risen to 150 people fed per farm. The experts predict that by 2050 the world population will reach 9.6 billion. That is a lot of mouth's to feed. To meet that future demand, the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organisation  estimates that agricultural production will need to increase by 60%.

More homes are needed to house that population. Its a world wide issue. However the world's farmland is decreasing. Every two years an area roughly the size of Britain is lost to agriculture. as houses are built on prime agricultural elite soils. So what is Auckland's food security policy? Or will we just increase our food imports from unregulated providers elsewhere in the world.

One of New Zealand's most popular and colourful local politicians, Dove-Meyer Robinson was the longest serving mayor of Auckland city, holding office for 18 years between 1959 and 1980. He had a vision of the future and the development north of the city. And he wanted to build a bridge that would see the road, rail, pedestrian, cycling needs of a growing city way into the future. The Government of the day said he didn't need that and offered him one third of the cost. Of course we all know more capacity for road traffic was needed pretty soon after and more recently  we have been regretting the lack of that rail link.

That minimalist approach to infrastructure has continued, hence we are always playing catch-up.

Currently I drive 48 kilometres to work. If I were to take public transport, it could be three train rides and at least one bus. It takes around an hour and a half by car, sometimes two, and God willing there are no accidents which stem the flow completely.

That is at least 3 hours per day, 15 hours per week, 750 hours a year I do not get to spend with family, community or other interests such as, sport and church. As thousands more houses come on line, that commute is going to increase substantially and in a very short space of time. As new house come on line and are occupied, there will be more and more commuter traffic. The wasted time will dramatically increase and the social cost to families and communities will be immense.

The only major infrastructure project to deal with or more likely mitigate somewhat is the  short stretch of motorway widening between Karaka and Takanini.

I had the good fortune to see a development in China. I saw houses, highways, rail, town centre, schools and services - everything you would need to support a large population but not a single person in sight except construction workers. When everything was finished then the people came to take up residence.

How sensible is that?

Extracts from this BLOG were first published by Stuff.co.nz on Monday 3rd December 2018.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/auckland/109019658/new-4500home-subdivision-in-paerata-will-only-add-to-traffic-woes-residents-say

Welcome to The Royal A&P Show 2018

Good evening Mr President, I would also like to introduce members of the RAS Executive here this evening, Vice President, Brent Snellex from Rangiora, Kelly Allison from the deep south and Cara O'Connor who has been  equestrian judging all day and unable to be with us this evening.The RAS CEO, Debbie Cameron is also attending the show.

The Royal Agricultural Society of New Zealand is the umbrella group for the 97 A&P Shows and 65 Breed & Kindred Societies in New Zealand. It is also one of the oldest organisations in NZ, with its own Act of Parliament and Royal Charter.

Yoda, the Star Wars Jedi Master so prophetical said, “Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.”

That is certainly the case with the Agricultural economy.

Gene editing technology has highlighted some benefits it could bring to agriculture,  such as removing allergy causing compounds in cow’s milk; disease proofing Manuka honey; speeding up apple variety selection; significantly reducing pest levels and shortening the time to market for developing new crops.

The Agri-Science community is, without doubt, an exciting place to be.

It is also great to see the launch by the Red Meat Profit Partnership, of the Key Performance Indicators booklet with 16 core KPIs to help farmers measure their business performance.

And on a more basic note, experience based observations such as that revealed by Steve Wynn-Harris in a recent Farmers Weekly. He disclosed that at 60 he isn’t fast enough to catch stud lambs to tag.

He has taken to using a fishing net to catch them. The net, apparently, is also handy for popping over one of the triplet lambs and standing on the handle while he deals with the siblings.

Innovation drives growth and unearths opportunities. From this gamut of innovation, development and practical experience we must remember the community in which we live and to whom we sell.

We must be aware of the issues of environment; animal well-being; nutrition; ethical and sustainable production; how red meat is being produced; and evolving consumer expectations and concerns.

We should not be allowing the Vegan Lobby under the guise of animal welfare to dictate the negative and biased establishment media agenda.

We have not been doing a good job of anticipating or responding to those issues. Therefore many people are misinformed about farming. Young people, the next generation of consumers, have their own expectations. Many urban kids have no idea there is a whole other world outside their suburb. It is easier for them, and their parents, to absorb click bait headlines adorned with emotion than it is to read in-depth articles that pursue the evidence.

We need to take everyone with us & leave no-one behind!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we need A&P Shows.

Over the 26 week season there will be 97 of them quite literally from one end of the country to the other.

These Shows are a unique, marketing, educative, relationship building machine that no one business could ever dream of recreating to promote their interest. The A&P platform provides fun; opportunities for hands on; asking questions without feeling intimidated and to get a positive and good understanding of our industry.

Shows are important to illustrate reality at a glance.

And what is more, this promotional machine comes with a huge voluntary and sponsor support network.

Mr President, thanks to you and your great Hawkes Bay A&P team here at the Showgrounds Hawkes Bay Tomoana, your generous sponsors and volunteers, for getting together to create something special, The New Zealand Royal A&P Show 2018, the flagship event of the 97 Show network.

Hopefully many agriculturally vested interest groups recognise this amazing opportunity to showcase; to tell the story; to create the news; and to engage with the wider and influential urbanised community.

Finally, Mr President, I am pleased to advise you that the Executive of the Royal Agricultural Society have awarded the Hawkes Bay A&P the right to host a Royal A&P Show for the next three years. We are most grateful for the work you have done for the brand and we wish you all the best for the future.

 

 

The T2 Driving Schmucks Club

Each morning I access the motorway at Karaka to join many others for a while on the way to my office.

The  on ramp is divided into three lanes, all clearly signed for purpose. Two of them are for folk like me, one person per vehicle. We have to queue up and our access to the motorway is controlled by a set of traffic lights which moderate the traffic to hopefully improve traffic flow. A third lane on the left is reserved for heavy or commercial vehicles (over 3.5 tonne) and vehicles with 2 or more passengers. Their flow onto the motorway is not hindered by traffic lights.

I have noticed that apparently there are some exceptions to the T2 rules. Some vehicles which have only one driver, or are a ute under 3.5 tonnes, have the right to use this lane they would not otherwise qualify for. Using this lane puts them up to 20-30 vehicles ahead in the queue. Use doesn’t seem to be universal though, for example, not all utes with one person on board get to use the lane.

This would be a club worth belonging to.

It is frustrating when you have observed all the rules, worked your way to the head of the queue, to have a vehicle like AKA6**, with one person, come swooping up on your inside to nudge their way ahead of you into the next queue.

So how do I get to belong to this club? Initially I assumed they were some kind of emergency worker required immediately somewhere to save a life or prevent a domestic flight hi-jacking, but apparently not.

In a community like ours, if you don’t know something you do not have to ask too many people to get the right connection. And I know a person or two who know stuff. But to my complete surprise I could find not a single person who knew how to get membership to this special and privileged club.

I had contemplated hopping out of my car and asking the driver of AKA6**., after all he had a sign on the tailgate window of his station wagon which read ‘Intelligent Protection System’, but no he was off on his next busy move.

I had given up ever finding out how I could become a member of this club and gain such a traffic advantage. That was until I ended up sitting next to an older chap having a coffee at Mangere Bridge Village. We were chatting away and I raised this subject then asked him if, by chance, he knew anything about this club.

I was quite unprepared for his very enthusiastic revelation in response. Thank goodness I wasn’t sitting across from him otherwise I would have been showered by a mouthful of Chai Latte (without sugar)!

That was followed by a burst of words, many of which I wouldn’t normally use and from what others tell me, are not printable. But I did pick up what I thought was a key word in my search for the club – ‘Schmucks!’

Success!  Finally, a vital word clue in my search for membership of this special and exclusive club. So I am off to chat with another friend, Mr Google, to find out more about this ‘T2 Driving Schmucks Club’. I’ll let you know how I get on.

 

First published in the Franklin County News on 27th September 2018

Techno Nosey Parkers

Your employer could be using your social media presence to see if you are looking for a new job.

You may recall a month or so back I wrote about Facebook and how we are now keenly aware of how our data is being accessed and manipulated, often without our knowledge.

And if you post a picture of yourself, and your face is visible, you can be identified by those nosey parkers. Well, there is a whole new meaning to nosey parker now.

Google tracks your movements even if you have turned location history off. An investigation has found that even if you explicitly tell Google not to track your location and movements on your iPhone or your Android smartphone, they do anyway.

The investigation found that users are being misled by Google’s claim that for those who turn off Location History “the places you go are no longer stored.” In fact, even with Location History turned off, some Google apps automatically store time-stamped location data without asking. For example, Google stores a snapshot of where you are when you merely open its Maps app. Automatic daily weather updates on Android phones pinpoint roughly where you are. And some searches which have nothing to do with location, like “chocolate chip cookies,” or “kids science kits,” pinpoint your precise latitude and longitude, accurate to the square foot, and save it to your Google account.

So many of the company’s services track your location, it’s virtually impossible for the user to know just how many services they need to disable to regain their privacy. Now that you have digested that, take a swallow of this next revelation.

There is a powerful new “face search” engine that could be a privacy nightmare. Cybersecurity firm Trustwave has released an open source tool to find accounts of large volumes of people across social media platforms by automatically matching names and profile pictures.

The tool, Social Mapper, is designed for testing security measures and gain access to computers. Social Mapper users provide their own login credentials to various social networks, along with a file specifying names and facial images of the people they are interested in targeting. The tool then logs into the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram, and uses the sites search tools and open source facial recognition tools to find and log likely matches.

Whilst designed for a specific security purpose, there have to be concerns about whether it could be used for malicious purposes or to violate people’s privacy. And we already know privacy doesn’t count for much in this techno world. Once Social Mapper has finished running and the reports have been collected here are just a couple of uses that information could be used for:

• Create fake social media profiles to ‘friend’ the targets and send them links to credential capturing landing pages or download malware. Recent statistics show social media users are more than twice as likely to click on links and open documents compared to those delivered via email.
• Trick users into disclosing their emails and phone numbers.
• View target photos looking for employee access card badges and familiarise yourself with building interiors.

But wait there is more.

In San Francisco, hiQ, a data mining company helps employers predict which of their employees are thinking about jumping ship.

They built their business on the back of a valuable cache of data – public user profiles on the professional networking site LinkedIn. Is the data you share publically on social networking sites like an announcement in a public space?

LinkedIn says ‘No’.

hiQ says ‘Yes’ and recently a California judge sided with hiQ.

First published in the Franklin County News Thursday 6th September 2018.

Communities Redefined

A while back in the good ol days of the Franklin District I recall attending a community meeting in Waiuku to discuss the Council Plan. I was fresh back from a visit to the States where I had spent a few days in Tucson Arizona as the guest of the University Business School. Water was pretty precious there in the desert. I was impressed that every house had two separate supplies of water. One was treated water for human consumption the other was recycled grey and waste water to be used for flushing the toilet, watering the garden, washing the car.

At the Council meeting in Waiuku I asked what our plans were for water recycling, and also why every house didn’t have a water tank. Neither of those were on the agenda.

Of course now we are flat out building dormitory suburbs in Franklin on A class growing soils. Instead of doing what we always do, the development could have been a fabulous opportunity to make a difference.

There are those who argue our modern lifestyle is utterly unsustainable. The technology already exists to change that and it is just a matter of applying science into the architecture of everyday life.

ReGen Villages is a start-up real estate development company aiming to build small, self-sustaining residential communities around the world. The first one is expected to be completed in Almere in the Netherlands in 2018. It will collect and store its own water and energy, grow its own food, and process much of its own waste. Also, no cars. Each completed village will house 100 families on about 50 acres. ReGen villages are designed to give people an environmentally friendly alternative to urban life.

ReGen stands for regenerative, where the outputs of one system are the inputs of another. The concept combines a variety of innovative technologies, such as energy positive homes, renewable energy, energy storage, door-step high yield organic food production, vertical farming aquaponics / aeroponics, water management and waste-to-resource systems. Food waste will turn into fish food for aquaculture, and houses will filter rain water.

Homes in these communities are totally designed for sustainable living. The community shares water storage facilities and there are areas for livestock, communal dinning, playgrounds and communal learning centres.

A living machine system will use plants and trees to filter sewage, and a separate anaerobic digester will handle the neighbourhood’s sewage and provide irrigation or water reused in energy systems. A system for processing food and animal waste will use black soldier flies and aquatic worms to digest the waste and create both chicken and fish feed.

James Ehrlich is the founder of ReGen Villages. He reckons a neighbourhood can be connected the way it’s supposed to be which is around natural resources. As cities become increasingly expensive and crowded, Ehrlich believes this type of development may become more common.

There is a terrible housing crisis and Governments around the world are in a desperate situation to build probably over a billion new homes. At the same time they wrestle with a number of things including the commercial interests of farmers, the commercial interests of traditional real estate developers and material companies which have been doing things the same way for a long time. Without doubt we need to provide new kinds of suburbs and new kinds of neighbourhoods.

Have we missed the opportunity to lead by example, in our clean green country, to redefine residential real-estate development for the next three billion people coming to the planet?

 

First published in the Franklin County News 21 August 2018